What would Jesus say…
…about believing in a God you can’t see?

One of the most common reasons I hear people give for not believing in God is

“…because I’ve never seen him. I can’t believe in what I can’t see.” Nobody has ever seen God, and it’s hard to believe in what you can’t see. Why should we believe in any one version of God rather than another, and why believe in any God at all?

Many people take advantage of the fact that we can’t see God, to decide what they would like God to be like. “I like to think of God as resourceful but not interrupting,” or, “I don’t like to think of God as jealous.” If we do that, God for us is who we want him to be. In most cases it turns out that we are projecting our own values onto an idea of God, creating God in our own image.

But the Bible tells us that we are not to do that. The God of the Bible calls himself “I AM WHO I AM”[1] and creates people in his image, not the other way around. But how can we know what he is really like (as opposed to what we would like him to be like) if we can’t see him? It’s hard to know if he’s even there, isn’t it?

Actually, it’s now not as hard as it used to be. Jesus, who called God Father,

said, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.”[2] He claimed to be so close to God as actually to be God, and claimed that he existed with God before he was born. One of his followers, John, distilled what he heard Jesus teach like this: “No one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only, who is at the Father's side, has made him known.”[3]

When people ask me if I’ve ever seen God, I sometimes answer, “I could’ve, if

I hadn’t been born too late.” Because God really became a man twenty centuries ago and walked around in the Middle East. If you or I had been there, we could have seen him. What would Jesus say about believing in a God we can’t see? He’d say, “Look at me.” We can’t see him today, but he doesn’t think that’s necessarily a problem. He said to his friend Thomas, a man who, until he saw with his own eyes, had been sceptical about the fact that Jesus was alive again after dying, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”[4] The reason this is possible is not by wishful thinking, but because the eyewitnesses were so careful to record what they saw and heard for the benefit of people like you and me. Their accounts (in Matthew, Mark, Luke, John) are remarkably accessible. They have been accurately translated into clear English. And so when Jesus says, “look at me”, I imagine he would explain how by encouraging us to read one of those four little books. Or to get someone to help us read them.

[1] Exodus 3:14
[2] John 14:9
[3] John 1:18
[4] John 20:29

Jonty Frith

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